I downloaded and installed the latest Age of Conan patch last night. It seemed to fix a lot of my performance problems.

First, the patcher was pretty quick. Compared to World of Warcraft, it was great. Compared to WoW, though, downloading the latest Netscape browser overnight on a 14.4 modem in 1995 seems quick.

Second, load times seemed much quicker in all areas.

Third, I didn’t have change anything regarding the number of cores the Ageofconan.exe file used, or change the process affinity. The client performed pretty well with no adjustments. I don’t know if the build actually utilizes multi-core technology now, but at least it doesn’t hose my machine.

Whatever was causing stuttering, lagging, hitching, and generally dismal performance in the previous build seems to be corrected, at least on my machine. Age of Conan does still tax my machine in a way no other mmorpg has done (I haven’t played Vanguard), but this build is much more playable. I spent my time paying attention to the game instead of feeling like the performance level prevented me from playing.

I haven’t tried to crank up the graphics yet, I’ll do that later today. I just wanted to get through a play session without things breaking. Comparing graphics is highly subjective, but I want to turn them up to LoTRO settings and see how Conan runs on my machine. LoTRO is remarkably smooth at high levels, and I want to see if Conan can perform similarly.

My biggest problem with the new build is a graphical glitch. There are times when light is displayed incorrectly, and I get the cathedral effect, like sunlight streaming through a gap in the clouds. The screenshot below shows what I mean. I get this on random light sources, every time blood spatters, and every time an opposing NPC casts a spell. It pretty much obscures the screen. Hopefully it gets fixed, or I figure out what setting causes it so I can turn it off.

That’s just a static shot. It’s much more annoying in combat, when I’m trying to see opponent shield settings and the blood spatter is blocking things out.

I’m encouraged, though. It’s not perfect, it’s still not as smooth as I’d like, but it’s definitely progress. I could play it at launch like this, I think, although I’m not sure the rest of the world will be as smooth as my experiences in the starting areas and Tortage last night. I’m cautiously optimistic, I suppose.

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9 Responses

This “uber” patch was a wunderkind for me. I was quite pleased over frame rates, and I went in and maxed everything I could…and still had decent frames..
What is funny is this actually runs better than LOTRO for me…bizarre.
There were issues at different points, that just kept going away at least.
The press ESC get thrown to desktop issue was fixed by just saying “Continue” in the box that came up, then it never went back to Desktop that whole session
I had one NEW character that after she reached Tortage, kept falling through the bridge, and walked through walls. I relogged and all was fine.
But, none of these felt like the end of the world for me..not like Vanguard, Tabula Rasa or LOTRO
The reason is the game has so much to give for sticking it out.,.
My final score for this OB was an 8/10.

@Mr. Skladak, I think they changed the level requirement for PvP weekend to level 2. Basically, if you made a character and did the first quest (Get the key to free the girl), that character will be leveled up to 20.

I’ve got 4 characters I can try. Ranger, Barbarian, HoX (Can’t spell the X word yet 🙂 ), and a Bear Shaman. I’m hoping to get in a lot of PvP time this evening, we’ll see!